Horsewright
Knifemaker / Craftsman / Service Provider
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2011
- Messages
- 13,071
So its your second buffalo. Taken traditionally with single shot Sharps. Whats a guy to do? After all a guy only needs so many buffalo robes.
Ya could use the shin bones for some knife handles, and we did:
And take one I made for you hunting again:
But what about the hide itself, what are we gonna do? How about a pair of wooly chaps. So I receive a very large box one day. Open it up and here is this buffalo hide all tanned and ready to go. Follow along as we (Nichole and I) make a pair wooly shotgun chaps using this hide. This was a complex project and they were constructed over a period of months.
There are lots of different types of leggings worn by cowboys. Shotgun chaps are a traditional type of chap that covers the whole leg. Nowadays they close on the outside of the leg with a full length zipper. In this pic Nichole is standing by ready to give some injections to this cow we were adding to out herd. She is wearing a pair of charmitas, a shorter, open legged type legging. The guy fixing the foot ropes is wearing a pair of shotguns. You can see how they completely enclose the entire leg. The zipper is under the fringe on the outside of the leg. This was what we were gonna be building. I'm on the paint horse. He's Clancy "The Rock", probably the best horse I've ever thrown a saddle over. Just put him down about a year ago, he was 36 years old. He was so tough we were using him on the ranch into his 30's. The average lifespan of a horse is 20. He's buried out front here at the house. On top of The Rock are some big rocks to mark the spot.
I only build shotgun chaps under two conditions:
1) I measure you.
2) You have a pair already that fit you well and you send me a tracing of one of the legs as well as your measurements.
I use to build a lot of these years ago but stopped taking orders for them through the website. Just had too many problems with people sending me bad measurements. In shotguns there is very little if any adjustment unlike chinks or charmitas. If you tell me your upper thigh measurement is 24" in circumference and its really 28", I can't fix that, (yeah actually happened). On this pair we were working on #2 as the customer is in AR. We've been good friends over the phone and internet for years but have never met in person.
So we're cutting out some parts. Shotguns are usually pretty spendy anyways cause you use two sides of leather for each pair. Each leg has to be cut along the back bone of a side so that they stretch and break in evenly. This pair used three sides as the fringe and some of the highlights were to be a wine color. We cut the buffalo oversized to make fitting easier and also to give the bottom edge a natural falling edge. Many pairs of woolies created today just have a sharp edge cut in the hair at the bottom. We were trying to avoid that and have the hair at the bottom of the leg look natural. As ya can imagine these chaps take up quite a bit of workbench real estate. Here I'm using the paper tracing of the existing chaps to cut out the hide piece you can see I'm going over sized:
Some of the parts cut out. Its not unusual for a complex project like this to evolve as it progresses. We decided not to use these basket stamped yokes that go at the top of each leg. We decided to go with a basket stamped, flower carved combo yoke. This was to match a new saddle. Also decided that this wine color was too pinkish, too light. we got a different side of leather for the fringe.
Getting ready to start glueing and sewing the hide to the leg pieces. Here the glue is drying. We'll only be doing the inside edge first.
Got those edges glued down and now have to trim the hair so I can sew the edge.
We've made a pair of woolies out of bear hide before and we were able to use a pair of scissors to clean up the hair so we could sew the edge. Buffalo is whole different critter (sorry for the pun) and scissors just bounced off. I ended up using my little EDC to get er done:
What I'm doing is creating a place on the hide that is clean enough so I can sew to it. Yep that'll work:
So inside Nichole is working on the new yokes:
All finished, now just need the oil:
So one morning about 0230 I get up cause I can't sleep. Go out in the shop and get going on these guys. Nichole came out and joined me at a more normal time like 0800 and we took the day and got em done. So now we have a lot of fitting of the hide to the leg pieces and sewing. Scissors won't work and thats gonna be a lot of scraping with a knife blade...I know, went and got the horse clippers. Worked great! here I'm fitting the hide and the top leg reinforcement piece that transitions from the regular leather of the back of the leg, goes over the hide and under the yoke:
This will be trimmed and sewn first before the yoke is put on:
Ya can see that early morning light sneaking through the windows:
Nichole rocking the Cobra 18 sewing on this leg reinforcement piece:
Most of the time it would take my hands too to help keep parts ya didn't want sewn out of the way:
Well keep following along as we finished these up. Can only post 20 pics at a time any more so will have to do this in segments. Questions and comments always welcome.
Ya could use the shin bones for some knife handles, and we did:
And take one I made for you hunting again:
But what about the hide itself, what are we gonna do? How about a pair of wooly chaps. So I receive a very large box one day. Open it up and here is this buffalo hide all tanned and ready to go. Follow along as we (Nichole and I) make a pair wooly shotgun chaps using this hide. This was a complex project and they were constructed over a period of months.
There are lots of different types of leggings worn by cowboys. Shotgun chaps are a traditional type of chap that covers the whole leg. Nowadays they close on the outside of the leg with a full length zipper. In this pic Nichole is standing by ready to give some injections to this cow we were adding to out herd. She is wearing a pair of charmitas, a shorter, open legged type legging. The guy fixing the foot ropes is wearing a pair of shotguns. You can see how they completely enclose the entire leg. The zipper is under the fringe on the outside of the leg. This was what we were gonna be building. I'm on the paint horse. He's Clancy "The Rock", probably the best horse I've ever thrown a saddle over. Just put him down about a year ago, he was 36 years old. He was so tough we were using him on the ranch into his 30's. The average lifespan of a horse is 20. He's buried out front here at the house. On top of The Rock are some big rocks to mark the spot.
I only build shotgun chaps under two conditions:
1) I measure you.
2) You have a pair already that fit you well and you send me a tracing of one of the legs as well as your measurements.
I use to build a lot of these years ago but stopped taking orders for them through the website. Just had too many problems with people sending me bad measurements. In shotguns there is very little if any adjustment unlike chinks or charmitas. If you tell me your upper thigh measurement is 24" in circumference and its really 28", I can't fix that, (yeah actually happened). On this pair we were working on #2 as the customer is in AR. We've been good friends over the phone and internet for years but have never met in person.
So we're cutting out some parts. Shotguns are usually pretty spendy anyways cause you use two sides of leather for each pair. Each leg has to be cut along the back bone of a side so that they stretch and break in evenly. This pair used three sides as the fringe and some of the highlights were to be a wine color. We cut the buffalo oversized to make fitting easier and also to give the bottom edge a natural falling edge. Many pairs of woolies created today just have a sharp edge cut in the hair at the bottom. We were trying to avoid that and have the hair at the bottom of the leg look natural. As ya can imagine these chaps take up quite a bit of workbench real estate. Here I'm using the paper tracing of the existing chaps to cut out the hide piece you can see I'm going over sized:
Some of the parts cut out. Its not unusual for a complex project like this to evolve as it progresses. We decided not to use these basket stamped yokes that go at the top of each leg. We decided to go with a basket stamped, flower carved combo yoke. This was to match a new saddle. Also decided that this wine color was too pinkish, too light. we got a different side of leather for the fringe.
Getting ready to start glueing and sewing the hide to the leg pieces. Here the glue is drying. We'll only be doing the inside edge first.
Got those edges glued down and now have to trim the hair so I can sew the edge.
We've made a pair of woolies out of bear hide before and we were able to use a pair of scissors to clean up the hair so we could sew the edge. Buffalo is whole different critter (sorry for the pun) and scissors just bounced off. I ended up using my little EDC to get er done:
What I'm doing is creating a place on the hide that is clean enough so I can sew to it. Yep that'll work:
So inside Nichole is working on the new yokes:
All finished, now just need the oil:
So one morning about 0230 I get up cause I can't sleep. Go out in the shop and get going on these guys. Nichole came out and joined me at a more normal time like 0800 and we took the day and got em done. So now we have a lot of fitting of the hide to the leg pieces and sewing. Scissors won't work and thats gonna be a lot of scraping with a knife blade...I know, went and got the horse clippers. Worked great! here I'm fitting the hide and the top leg reinforcement piece that transitions from the regular leather of the back of the leg, goes over the hide and under the yoke:
This will be trimmed and sewn first before the yoke is put on:
Ya can see that early morning light sneaking through the windows:
Nichole rocking the Cobra 18 sewing on this leg reinforcement piece:
Most of the time it would take my hands too to help keep parts ya didn't want sewn out of the way:
Well keep following along as we finished these up. Can only post 20 pics at a time any more so will have to do this in segments. Questions and comments always welcome.
